Littlewoods and the Repositioning of Myleene Klass

A few days ago we reported on the launch of Littlewoods's Christmas TV advertising, as well as the detailed on-the-ground campaign that was planned to back it up.  Core to the campaign was the figure of Myleene Klass.  While competitors such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis had in previous years invested heavily in celebrities for their Christmas campaigns, the trend in 2014 has been to save money and focus on developing the brand narrative.  Apart from Littlewoods, the only major retailers to use celebrities this year have been Morrisons (with Ant and Dec) and Iceland (with Peter Andre).

Myleene Klass's Twitter picture: a brand repositioning?

Using celebrities has always been popular with brands as they raise the profile and gain you popular recognition.  In the digital environment, too, the celebrity's fanbase on Twitter and FaceBook is usually far larger than the retailer's, and we can see Peter Andre in particular working this resource effectively for the benefit of his employer.

Littlewoods this week have seen a massive boost to their visibility through the involvement of Myleene Klass, but probably for the wrong reasons.  The controversy started on 17 November when she appeared in a TV debate with politician Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain's Labour party.  Klass energetically laid into Labour's plans for a so-called Mansion Tax.
 
Over the following days, much of the popular press focused on Milliband's discomfort - and so the controversy did not undermine the Littlewoods brand.  But Labour then produced a response almost tailor-made for the social media age: Milliband's PRs used the phrase "pure and simple" - a direct reference to the 2001 pop single from a made-for-TV band called Hear'Say, featuring a then unknown Myleene Klass.  The original tweet announcing this, at the time of writing, has been re-tweeted 900 times and has been favourited 444 times.

Almost immediately, online and in the mainstream media Myleene Klass became a target of derision.  The Daily Telegraph called her "a deadly force of nature":  Klass's rhetorical question in the original TV debate "have you seen what [£2 million] can get you? It’s like a garage" became a meme in itself, with social media users only too happy to provide answers.  As a result the Klass brand which was originally aligned with popular TV reality shows such as I'm a Celebrity came to be more associated with wealth and privilege.  The so called Mansion Tax that Klass was taking issue with would affect just 1% of the houses in Britain, with their millionnaire residents being unlikely ever to be Littlewoods customers.  Her intervention certainly generated publicity for Klass (and she was not slow to use it to promote a possible Hear'Say comeback).

Klass and Miliband in the original TV debate: picture Daily Mail

The publicity also meant that pre-arranged parta of the Littlewoods Christmas campaign got far more publicity than they might have done prior to the media storm.  Obligingly, the Daily Mail's "exclusive" on 19 November never even mentioned Mansion Tax.  While this may have been a damage limitation exercise by Klass and Littlewoods, it had little effect. On the same day an online petition was started to have Klass dropped as the face of Littlewoods citing her “deeply insensitive and ignorant comments”.  This then sparked a counter petition calling for the anti-Klass petition to be withdrawn.

Meme and counter meme: at the time of writing, there are 15 times more people wanting Littlewoods to drop Klass than there are digital voters wanting the 'drop Klass' campaign stopped.  Klass herself is being uncharacteristically quiet on Twitter.  As we noted with John Lewis's Monty the Penguin meme, the popular counter-blast does not necessarily harm the original.  It may be a different matter for Littlewoods.

Is this war? Morrisons and #MakeChristmasSpecial

Ant & Dec in the new advertisement.  Picture Daily Star

The last major UK retailer to reveal their Christmas advertising campaign is Morrisons.  This is launching tonight (14 November) during the commercial break in Coronation Street, which should expose the ad to around 7 million viewers.
 
Morrisons' 350,000 Facebook fans were given a preview last night, while the ad was launched on YouTube earlier today.  It was a slow start: at the time of writing the ad was getting about 50 hits an hour on the official page: in the same period last night, Sainsbury's were achieving 150,000 an hour.  Sainsbury's have a theme of war, and the press have been making it clear that competition on the high street is so severe that war is exactly what is being declared on TV and online.

According to the popular press Morrisons are targeting Lidl and Aldi, and using the ad to stress the freshness of their food.  Evidently 2013 found Morrisons shoppers to be "promiscuous", splitting their shopping between the major supermarket and their cheaper German rivals. With like-for-like sales down 7.4% in the first 6 months of 2014, this turned out to be "disastrous" for Morrisions and the new campaign aims to win the wayward shoppers back into a monogamous relationship.

Marketing is the key to Morrisons' turnaround strategy, according to their brand and communications director; the plan is to "ramp up [the] Christmas marketing budget".  Last year Tesco did the same and actually saw a drop in sales of 2.4%.  Morrisons plans to be more clever with their spend: like others it has plans to leverage social media traffic.  This involves music, with the supermarket sponsoring Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball, and a deal with boy band Union J.  Both of these initiatives are designed to give audiences content to share on social media. Union J have more than 1.5 million Twitter followers, mostly thought to be children or young teens.  The Jingle Bell Ball will associate Morrisons with major acts including Taylor Swift, Take That, OneRepublic and Ed Sheeran.

Morrisions are also behind the launch of a special recording of their Christmas song "It's beginning to look a lot like Chrismas" by Union J, which will be performed at special ''song booths' in some stores where customers will be able to record their own voices over the song and share these via social media.  Sounds like a terrible idea to us, but hey, there's a war on.



Some more point-of-sale promotion (rather than the virtual kind) will come via giant Christmas pudding shaped vans visiting 32 different stores, offering free food and money off vouchers.  This is similar to what online-only retailer Littlewoods is doing with pantomime themed promotions in city centres.

Morrisons are continuing to invest in celebrity endorsement, with the 2014 fronted by Ant and Dec as in previous years.  As we have noted in other posts, celebrities can be very useful in social media if they work for their money, as they generally have much larger fan bases than the retailers.  Morrisons have been attempting to kickstart the campaign via Twitter with the #MakeChristmasSpecial hashtag - a clumsy choice (too long and tricky to spell) which so far has gained no traction online.

In summary, a piece of advertising which will fail to engage with the chattering classes, but which clearly targets a particular audience - "Mums and kids".  Morrisons have thought through the issues and have something in place that may just people sharing its values.  The problem is that, at the time of writing at least, not even the mums and kids have bought into the campaign.